...2: What else is going to get people to volunteer to go to terribly uncomfortable foreign places and trade bullets with people they've never met? Bear in mind, both of my parents are noncombat air force veterans...
Calm down, Nikov. If I meant it, I wouldn't have included my parents in there. The real reasons people join the military are largely similar to the reasons they get other jobs (money, particularly for education, healthcare, etc.), plus uniforms look cool. And certainly the majority of soldiers also feel that hey, they're helping somebody out. Soldiers deserve our respect and admiration, even if we disagree with the orders they are occasionally given. In this very narrow context of this thread, I made a silly fun times laugh saying joke for comedy value, one that poked good-natured fun at my own values and the predjuces of others, and said joke took the basic form of myself being sarcastically exasperated with nearly entirely fictional military failings.
You forgot the Mexican drug cartels.
See, now KaminaSquirtle gets it!
Rest assured, I realize that even having every congressperson replaced with a tea party member would not only be hilarious but also very much likely not worse than nuclear anhillation, at least for one or two terms.
All of my rethoric here is meant to be taken lightly and/or not at face value, much like how people saying that obama is a socialis muslim almost certainly don't believe that, and are only trying to get a laugh.
The real people responsible for this whole debacle, besides myself for overestimating other's ability to detect sarcasm, is the news media for blowing the whole original story out of proportion. Agreed?